Dada/Surrealism Today

Wheeler is the creator of the super hero, "Too Much Coffee Man." I love his sense of humor. Maybe that's why nobody gets my jokes.

I can't eat anything that looks back at me

René Magritte. Portrait. 1935. NY:MoMA.

This was pretty creepy- just perfect for Halloween.

ANTI-ART (aka: Dada)

Max Ernst. The Virgin Chastising the Christ Child before Three Witnesses: Andre Breton, Paul Eluard, and the Painter. 1926. Cologne: Museum Ludwig.

Holy cats is this ever irreverent! Talk about hilarious. Please accept my apologies to any REALLY devout Catholics out there. But as a parent and a Lutheran (we don't venerate the saints, wishing to avoid risking idolatry, this was considered to be a very "iconoclastic" idea back during the reformation.) Guess what? STILL a touchy subject in 460 years later in the 1920's. Is this "Shock-Art?" Does it provoke the viewer to think? Who's being satirized? The long established conventions of religious art and artists? Catholics? Parents? All Christians? Moralists?

Whatever, I just manages to over-analyze it. It's enough that it's hilarious.

Dada LIVES!!!

This is called "Chance Encounter; ...or maybe it was a tuxedo, a sewing machine, a UPS truck and policemen." (web photo; no provenance available- I found it at some art professor's site from Kent State University).

"What's the point???" I hear you ask? There IS no point, that IS the point! Get it? That's Dada. That or some goofy kid getting ready for his prom told his buddy to take his picture holding a sewing machine in front of an accident because it would be SOOOOO cool!

Dada

"The true dadas
are against Dada."

~First International Dada Fair, 1919

Yet Dada was not aimless anarchy. Rather, the artists were responding to the violence and trauma of World War I—and to the shock of modernity more generally—by developing shock tactics of their own. They critiqued traditional conceptions of the artist as master of his medium by using prefabricated materials or relegating aesthetic decisions to chance. They scoffed at the conventional definition of artistic media, expanding it to include the stuff of modern life—newspapers, magazines, ticket stubs, mechanical parts, food wrappers, pipes, advertisements, light bulbs, and so on.
I love Dada- here is a great site to learn more